Baylor ‘pays’ freshmen to raise SAT scores

WACO, Texas — Baylor University offered incoming freshmen a $300 campus bookstore credit if they would retake the SAT last June, and those who raised their scores by at least 50 points were rewarded with $1,000 a year in merit scholarship aid, the school’s student newspaper reported in October.

About 28 percent of the newly admitted students accepted the offer, and 151 of them earned the $1,000 scholarships, collectively raising Baylor’s average SAT score for incoming freshmen from 1200 to 1210, still nine points below last year’s freshman class and three points below the 2006 class.

The offer for the class of 2012 came as Baylor dropped one point from No. 75 to No. 76 in the U.S. News and World Report ranking of colleges and universities, and it coincided with Baylor’s fast-approaching goal of achieving top-tier national college status by 2012.

“I found out that one main reason for Baylor’s drop in rank is because we accepted so many students this year with lower SAT scores,” Emanuel Gawrieh, a sophomore and a member of Baylor’s student advisory board, told The Baylor Lariat newspaper in a story published Oct. 9.

Reagan Ramsower, vice president for finance at Baylor, told The Lariat that the university had to recruit more students with a middle-ranking academic index in order to meet their enrollment goal of 3,000 freshmen. “The university does benefit from higher average scores and students benefited from book credits,” Ramsower said. “It’s a win-win situation.”

But Gawrieh and others said the deal amounted to Baylor, a 14,000-student Baptist-related university, paying for higher scores and rankings. “We’re at a Christian institution where morals and values are supposed to be all that it’s about,” Gawrieh said. “That was stretched and left behind in this decision.”

Baylor’s Faculty Senate passed a motion criticizing the effort Oct. 15, saying the practice is “academically dishonest and should be discontinued.” About 5 percent of members expressed approval for the financial incentives, The Lariat said.